When he had reached this point in his narration, the tall gentleman remembered suddenly that there had been a lady in evening dress, cut low and adorned with green sequins. But she was not to be found.

DAILY REMINDERS

IN Queen Anne's time the traveler past Temple Bar must behold sundry ownerless heads bleaching in the mist. This dreadful show was not an impersonal exhibit. It was staged and arranged for purposes of warning. 'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis,' as Goldsmith remarked to Johnson. 'Continue your Jacobite speculations,' these grisly heads said more plainly to the passer-by than if their mouths had spoken; 'forget your divine allegiance

here is where you too shall come.' In the same way, I reflected, as I slid through a closing door of the subway, missing by a hair's margin the amoeba's fate of continuance by division, and stood for an hour in meditation upon the rows of advertisements above me, these advertisements are the daily admonition to our more civilized age, less crude but more subtly forceful than sundered heads, of what we shall, without the grace of thought, become. I study them one by one different in what they illustrate, alike in their grinning idiocy. A man, handsome and robust, but smitten with secret madness, turns to embrace his too complaisant wife as a ten-cent can of beans comes upon the table. A child if the small monstrosity can be called by that familiar name · lifts hands of entreaty for the cod-liver oil just beyond reach, while a viking opposite, who drank his potion long ago, gazes unstirred. My eyes move on to the right, where a well-dressed family at a prettily appointed table becomes hysterical at the appearance of baked spaghetti. Just

beyond, a girl too young and sweet to deserve the hereditary curse of scrambled wits is offering a perspiring football hero, who has sunk down to rest after his exertion, a slice of bread without beverage, while beyond her a distinguished-looking man with graying hair clasps a box of buckwheat cereal with ill-concealed emotion.

Yes, I meditate as I gaze upon them, 'all smiling and all damned,' all are stricken with the same blight. Even the animals have not escaped. The fall of man has involved the brute creation with it. The tiger leers above a cheese, the bear grins from his quadrupedal flannels, the squirrel exhibits febrile longing at the sight of a salad dressing. There is, I admit, as, having exhausted the illustrations upon the right, I turn leftward, a horrible consistency about them all. It is a world remote from ours as bedlam; but, unlike bedlam, every exhibit in it bears allegiance to the same fixed rules as every other. A youth halts his courtship to thrust a bar of candy toward his love's rosy lips. A dissipated couple, whose appearance would indicate that nothing save a judge's injunction could hold them together, sit affectionately linked, listening to the music of a radio that relaxes their vicious lineaments. A baby's first word, while the parents bend close expectantly, is the name of a cracker. A father and mother make no effort to conceal their enjoyment as they administer a chest cure to their beaming offspring. beaming offspring. A grandmother grins like a ghoul at the hapless boy drinking chocolate.

The most horrible thing about them, as before remarked, is their consistency with themselves. They are all members of the same family. They may even be different ages and phases in the life of the same individual. The business man sufficiently snoopy to discover what Jones has saved will without doubt,

when transported to a moonlit cliff, blow tobacco smoke into a girl's face at her request or otherwise. The youth whose career is ruined by the fall of a fork will go mad with joy at a piece of chewing gum, both being phases of his manic-depressive malady. From humanity's point of view they are all mad, mad as March hares; but judged within their own circle they are perfectly unified. There is even a vitality and continuance about them. Does not the baby whose infant lips breathe a cracker's name become the youth who rushes from a play to smoke a five-cent cigar, and does not the youth, in time, with his suitable wife, produce the child who begs him to bring home a dark cathartic? The child, in turn

Horrified at the range of my speculation, I turn my eyes to the pale grotesqueries of humanity beneath these brilliant rows, and my heart goes out to them. Worn and lethargic though they be, they do not desert a friend for embonpoint or halitosis, or neglect the wife whose first gray streak of hair is appearing, or throw over the business associate who cannot hold a dinner party spellbound by the repetition of telephone dates.

My station is near. I prepare to depart with a bound through the door, as I arrived. I gaze my last upon our grisly warnings. 'Beware,' say these pictures of a mindless race as if their mouths had spoken, 'of joyance for

To my daughter, I leave $100,000. She will need it. The only good piece of business her husband ever did was to marry her.

To my valet, I leave the clothes that he has been stealing from me regularly for the last ten years. Also my fur coat that he wore last winter when I was in Palm Beach.

To my chauffeur, I leave my cars. He almost ruined them and I want him to have the satisfaction of finishing the job.

To my partner, I leave the suggestion that he take some other clever man in with him at once if he expects to do any business.

A. P. Herbert, whose initials are a trademark of wit, is an editor of Punch, who tells us his recreations are writing, reading, and making friends-all happily combined in the present drama. ¶Statistician, economist, and author, Dr. I. M. Rubinow, a holder of three degrees (B.A., Ph.D., M.D.), is a middle-aged father whose children are now in college. ¶For eleven weeks M. M. W., a victim of sleeping sickness, lived, moved, and had her being in another world. Then, not only did she recover, but on her return to normal existence she brought with her a store of recollections as vivid as they are inexplicable. Psychologists, attention! ¶A happy discovery has brought to light the wide-ranging letters of the second President, John Adams, to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse

letters covering thirty years and most of the subjects under the sun. Further portions of this correspondence will appear in a succeeding issue. ¶A member of an old Sussex family, Violet A. Simpson has written smuggling tales of that seacoast, as well as modern and historical novels of London.

An Englishwoman of letters, Dorothy Margaret Stuart makes her début in our columns. Like his famous grandfather, Bernard Darwin has lived the life he loves. A great golfer, he has played for England against Scotland and against the United States, and has twice reached the semifinals of the Amateur Championship. And in the rigor of the game he has never lost the pleasure of it, as golfers know who for decades have followed his regular correspondence in the London Times. Since his graduation from the Yale Divinity School in 1915, Reinhold Niebuhr has been pastor of the Bethel Evangelical Church of Detroit. It is a pleasure to announce that Mazo de la Roche is the winner of the Atlantic Novel Prize of $10,000. Since the first of the year our office has been piled

high with bulky manuscripts, which by the closing date had exceeded eleven hundred. By gradual degrees the number was reduced to six, then to three, and finally, by unanimous vote, to 'Jalna.' A young Canadian, Miss de la Roche had her first short stories accepted by the Atlantic a decade ago. First a writer of whimsical juveniles, she now comes into her own as a novelist of bold and original power. ¶Likewise a Canadian, Frances Beatrice Taylor is on the staff of the London Free Press, London, Ontario. Edith Ronald Mirrielees has contributed stories and essays to the Atlantic. As Director of the Blue Hill Observatory of Harvard University, Alexander McAdie is on more intimate, more jovial terms with the elements than most of us.

In her many years' residence in China, Nora Waln has learned the dialect of every province in which she has been stationed. An American by birth and the wife of an English Civil Servant, she was at her husband's side through the hot days of the Nationalist uprising. Henry W. Nevinson, special correspondent to the world at large, has observed, over a period of thirty years, the outbreaks of war, famine, and turbulence that scar our globe. Of more pacific interest is his recent visit to the New Zion, where he passed several months. Publicist and a solicitor of his native city, Cork, John J. Horgan has inherited and sustained an active interest in the Nationalist movement. His father was an intimate friend of Parnell, and his election agent in all his political campaigns.

We are sorry not to include this month letters regarding a paper which has been discussed with an intensity of feeling recalling few parallels in our experience. For publishing its analysis of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, the Atlantic has been extolled and vili

fied, reasoned with and patted on the back. We enter no defense for an article characteristic of the Atlantic's continuous policy of seventy years; but it seems fair that critics who believe no evidence should be discussed while still within the jurisdiction of the courts should realize that the fortunes of Sacco and Vanzetti have been under such jurisdiction for six years, and that in such a case the single alternative to free speech lies in the subsequent publication of an obituary notice.

After all, under our happy American custom, criticism should be free unless the case against it is urgent and overwhelming. For the rest, we ask the privilege of quoting from an editorial in the Brooklyn Eagle:

Those who think of the Atlantic Monthly as a literary magazine, and wonder that it gives space in its March issue to an article by Felix Frankfurter scathingly treating the nonjudicial attitude of Judge Thayer in trying the Sacco-Vanzetti cases, forget that eleven years after he had electrified New England with the Biglow Papers, first series, excoriating the Mexican War, James Russell Lowell became the first editor of the Atlantic, and that most of the poems of the second series, in which Civil War patriotism and reconstruction patriotism were the themes, were written at the solicitation of James T. Fields and published in the Atlantic. Lowell was then Professor of Belles-Lettres at Harvard. Felix Frankfurter is a Harvard Law School professor. Harvard and the Atlantic have nothing to do with politics. With dignified and earnest Americanism they have been identified for seventy years. In turning the big guns of the Atlantic Monthly on Judge Webster Thayer, the magazine's management lives up to the highest traditions of the Atlantic. Professor Frankfurter does not use weasel words. Of the Thayer opinion denying a new trial he says: "The opinion is literally honeycombed with demonstrable errors, and a spirit alien to judicial utterances pervades the whole.'

***

The Reverend Mr. Parrish's prophecy of the disruption of Protestantism has been received with mingled concern and repudiation. From the correspondence we have selected two letters as representative of the more tolerant opinion. That Mr. Parrish is not alone in his conclusions is clearly evidenced by the sermon recently delivered by the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick at Appleton Chapel.

Every minister will understand the mood which, in all probability, prompted the writing of "The Break-up of Protestantism.' It is the mood of a tired soul, as old as Elijah when he fled to the wilderness after his conflict with the Priests of Baal and Ahab and Jezebel, and wished to die, because he supposed he alone was left to defend the worship of Jehovah. I suppose every minister has written a sermon on substantially the same lines, after a long strain of work under peculiarly discouraging conditions. I hope one of Mr. Parrish's parishioners will take him soon on a fishing trip.

Protestantism will not break up; neither will Catholicism. They may change organically, but neither Protestantism nor Catholicism is an ecclesiastical system only. They are types of temperament. There are Catholics within Protestantism, and Protestants within Catholicism. If Luther had not initiated Protestantism, someone else would have. For the despotism of Catholicism was due for a revolt sooner or later. It was inherent in human nature. Any discerning, broad-minded Catholic knows that Protestantism helps to keep Catholicism alive. Left to run her course, Catholicism would become so despotic that she would again develop revolt. No man can be trusted with too much power, neither king, nor pope, nor priest. It is a matter of history.

A business friend of mine in New York has on his desk a motto which flashed into my mind as I laid down Mr. Parrish's article: 'Startling, if true!' For instance, it is evident at a glance that in his outlook on the present-day Sunday School Mr. Parrish is writing from Episcopalian data. Many of the things he says are not true of the Sunday Schools of Nonconformist churches.

One of the elements of Elijah's depression was that he thought he was alone in the fight. He discovered later that there were seven thousand others who had not bowed the knee to Baal. Perhaps a broader outlook on churches of other faiths might help to save Mr. Parrish from his pessimism.

With much of the article I am in agreement, especially the section on church finances. He is right. Another commendable thing about the article is its freedom from cynicism and bitterness. Most writers in such a mood are not so restrained. Mr. Parrish must be a stimulating preacher. His parish is to be congratulated upon having such a leader. He will not die of dry rot. He is thinking hard on fundamental things. If he thinks wrong part of the time we can forgive him.

His article will provoke much discussion, just

as did that other article published by the Atlantic during the war, 'Peter Sat by the Fire.' Both unfair and one-sided, of course, but written at white heat and out of a passionate love for Protestantism. I hope we ministers will deal gently with Mr. Parrish.

HOWARD J. CHIDLEY

EUCLID AVENUE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH CLEVELAND, OHIO

DEAR ATLANTIC,

In an article in the Atlantic some years ago Reverend Willard Sperry spoke of the fact that 'as a matter of plain ecclesiastical history there never was a time when the Church was not in collapse. The Church has always had to live, and indeed has succeeded in living for some hundreds of years, in the face of the combined and uniform judgment of the specialists that from all the symptoms she should be in her grave.'

I have often recalled this and I did so again after reading the article on 'The Break-up of Protestantism.' It meets quite exactly the specifications of the type which Mr. Sperry characterized. And one might turn from it with this comment. Moreover, the various statements might one by one be controverted on the ground that they are either gross exaggerations or positively fallacious. But after all the broad generalizations which might still remain are disturbing to anyone who takes an interest in modern expressions of Christianity, and one is prompted to ask if Protestantism is really a spent force.

To this may not the reply be justly made that the writer has permitted himself to be overwhelmed in pessimism because he has not recalled that Protestantism is not a system or organization or form, but an idea? Protestantism is, that is to say, the religious proposition that a man stands in immediate unhindered relationship with God and that no intermediaries, either persons or forms, are essential to finding the full value of that fellowship. This idea may associate with itself such things as an almost superstitious love for the Bible or any of the existing forms of government in Protestant churches. But these are mere accidents. They may all pass. Protestantism will never pass until that idea passes. Can anyone consider modern tendencies and not be sure that it has a far stronger hold on life than its only alternative, the idea that sacraments and peculiarly ordained persons are necessary channels of God's grace? Protestantism will certainly outlive that conception, and when Protestantism passes, if it ever should, religion would be only a memory. But as well speak of air disappearing from a world of breathing men.

FERDINAND Q. BLANCHARD

Does this not seem to you a pretty bit of Time's irony? Yesterday, after supper in my new 'home town,' I, of now and Iowa, walked down from the hill the Danes fortified, where the American War prisoners of 1776 were herded, across the railway bridge over the valley around the hill the Normans topped with a castle, up the street almost to the police station with the Roman pavement at its entrance, in the Celtic part of town near the Cathedral, to the Civic Hall to hear an Australian lecture on 'How to Get Rid of War,' for the League of Nations Union. There some fifteen hundred people, the worshipful mayor wearing his golden chain, with a war orphan or a war widow in every row, sitting in the county of Plymouth, twelve miles from the 'desp'rate winter sea,' sang a hymn fervently, quite unconscious, apparently, of its origin:

It seems strange to me that the author of "The Modern Temper' in the February Atlantic should consider atheism modern. Over twentythree hundred years ago Greek thinkers taught an uncompromising materialism. There is nothing,' said Democritus, the Atomist (460 B.C.), 'but atoms and the void.' Lucretius, the Epicurean (98 B.C.), wrote his famous 'Essay on the Nature of Things' to establish the theory of the mechanical origin of the universe. Hegesius, the Cyrenaic (about 450 B.C.), preached suicide as the only solution to life's riddle so effectively that many of his hearers hanged